Showing results by author "james johnson" in All Categories

TAYLOR SWIFT: The Making of a Pop Machine is the real story of how a Pennsylvania girl with a dream became a billion-dollar brand, a streaming superpower, and the most influential artist of her generation. From country roots to stadium dominance. From Kanye interruptions to ten-minute revenge ballads. From Big Machine drama to legal warfare with Taylor’s Versions. From sad songs to supply chains. This isn’t just a pop star biography. It’s a business case study, a cultural timeline, and a reminder that no one weaponized heartbreak better than Taylor Swift.

Thanksgiving is one of America’s oldest traditions — but the story we tell about it is mostly myth. Thanks, But No Thanks walks through the real origins of the holiday, from the Indigenous nations who lived here long before the Pilgrims arrived, to the 1621 harvest feast, to the centuries of change that shaped Thanksgiving into what it is today. Along the way, it explores the wars, treaties, proclamations, school plays, family rituals, and cultural rewrites that turned a single event into a national tradition.

In this volume we collect together poets who, by the difference in the colour of their skin, were treated with such disdain and racism that it is difficult to believe that poetry of such tenderness, beauty and authority could exist.

JEFFERSON: The Man Who Owned the Dream is a sharp biography of America’s third president—not as a myth, not as a monument, but as a man. From the pen that drafted the Declaration to the plantation that paid his bills, this book traces Thomas Jefferson’s full arc without apology, spin, or blind hero worship. You’ll see the Enlightenment thinker. The political operator. The architect of Monticello. The author of liberty. The father of enslaved children. And the man who helped design a system built to break itself. No sermons. No soft gloves. Just the facts and the fallout.

Alcohol: How Booze Built the World is a deep dive into the liquid that shaped civilization—and occasionally ruined your weekend. From ancient mead and divine wine to frat party keg stands and $300 celebrity tequilas, this book uncorks the full story of alcohol: what it is, how it works, and why humans keep coming back for another round. It’s not an intervention. It’s a mirror. Whether you drink nightly, socially, occasionally, or not at all, Alcohol is a clear-eyed, unfiltered look at the world’s favorite substance—and the rituals, memories, mistakes, and meanings we’ve poured into it.

The FBI: How a Filing Cabinet Took Over America is a surgical walk through the most powerful domestic surveillance machine in U.S. history — and the terrifying banality behind it. From its paranoid birth to its modern algorithmic glow-up, this book traces how the FBI evolved from a desk job into an empire. This isn’t a thriller. This isn’t a rant. It’s the story of how America’s most trusted agency spent a hundred years collecting secrets, destroying lives, and filing it all away. J. Edgar Hoover. COINTELPRO. MLK. Waco. 9/11. Metadata. Informants. Blackmail. Bureaucracy as weapon.

He didn’t govern. He performed. Ronald Reagan wasn’t just America’s 40th president — he was its most dangerous leading man. In REAGAN: The Actor Who Played President, JJ peels back the smile, the flag, and the fog to reveal the system beneath the script. From Hollywood nobody to union snitch, from Cold War cowboy to corporate prophet, Reagan didn’t just lead the country — he taught it how to forget what it used to be. This is not a hit piece. It’s not a love letter. It’s the untold biography of the man who gave the machine a face — and taught it how to lie with style.

Why are there 40,000 versions of one faith? Branches is a plainspoken, occasionally funny, and honest walk through the tangled family tree of Christianity. From Catholicism to Pentecostalism, Methodists to Mormons, this book doesn’t preach — it maps.

Jeff Bezos didn’t just change shopping. He changed everything. From garage startup to global empire, Bezos: The Man Who Delivered the World walks you through the quiet construction of a system that now runs beneath your life — one click at a time. This isn’t a love letter. It’s not a hit piece either. It’s the blueprint. This is the story of how Jeff Bezos didn’t just sell you stuff… He taught you how to live inside the system that sells it.

He didn’t just think. He built the tools for thinking. Born in Macedon. Trained by Plato. Tutor to Alexander the Great. But more than anything, Aristotle was a blueprint engineer. A mind that broke reality into categories, causes, and systems that still shape the world today. This is the full map of Aristotle’s legacy. Across logic, biology, politics, metaphysics, ethics, storytelling, and more. He didn’t give us the answers. He gave us the frameworks to figure them out.

The Tao Te Ching is one of the most translated books in human history — and one of the most misunderstood. It’s just 81 verses long. But inside those verses is a quiet manual for living, leading, letting go, and lasting. This book strips away the confusion. No commentary. No spiritual fluff. No academic fog. Just the Tao, in plain language — one verse at a time. Whether you're new to the Tao or circling back for the tenth time, this version meets you where you are — and takes you a little deeper.

For over six hundred years, the Catholic Church operated one of the most feared systems of control the world has ever seen — not through armies or kings, but through questions. Were you a heretic? A witch? A secret Jew? A woman with knowledge? A man with doubts? You wouldn’t know until they knocked. In this darkly gripping and deeply researched history, James Johnson walks you through the smoke-filled chambers and torchlit streets of the Inquisition — from its earliest whispers in medieval France to its bloody climax in Spain, Portugal, Goa, and the New World.

Gold plates. Lost tribes. Prophets in the Americas. You’ve heard of it. You’ve seen the commercials. But what does the Book of Mormon actually say? This book walks you through it — with no spin, no theology, and no sales pitch. From a family fleeing Jerusalem to wars in the wilderness. From ancient American empires to Jesus Christ descending in glory, it’s all here. Prophets, plates, and Jesus in America. Whether you believe it or not — this is what it says.

What happens when faith picks up a sword? From the blood-soaked streets of Jerusalem to the burning of Constantinople, Deus Vult tells the full, unflinching story of the Crusades — the wars that defined medieval Christendom, reshaped the world, and left behind a legacy of violence, myth, and madness. This isn’t your average textbook history. It’s raw, irreverent, and razor-sharp. JJ delivers a fast-paced, brutally clear narrative of how the Crusades actually happened — without the gloss, without the Sunday school edits, and without pretending anyone knew what they were doing.

What do shamans, Freud, rats, TikTok, and your mother all have in common? They’ve all shaped how we try to make sense of the human mind. Psychology 101 is the crash course you never got. A sharp, irreverent walk through the strange saga of how humans have studied humans. From ancient soul-healing rituals to modern therapy apps, this book traces the rise of psychology across twelve iconic chapters. You’ll meet the gods of the field (Freud, Jung, Skinner, Maslow), the ghosts they chased (trauma, shadow, madness), and the machines that took over (algorithms, feeds, and digital brains).

Charles Darwin didn’t set out to destroy the old story of life. He just couldn’t look away from the cracks in it. From the deck of the Beagle to the hills of the Galápagos, Darwin saw what others missed — tiny details, local variations, uncomfortable truths. His theory of natural selection reshaped biology, shattered theology, and sparked one of the most dangerous ideas in human history: we are not separate from nature… we are subject to it. This is the story of a quiet man who changed the world — not with force, but with focus.

For centuries, college was a temple — a place of ideas, inquiry, and dusty robes. But somewhere between the monastery and the marketing department, something changed. In Campus, Inc., JJ takes listeners on a sly, engaging journey through the history of higher education. From theology lectures in medieval Europe to stadium-sized campuses with climbing walls and billion-dollar football programs, this is the story of how college became a business — and how success got sold, one loan at a time. This isn’t a takedown. It’s a timeline.

A sacred herb. A stoner joke. A billion-dollar industry. A criminal offense. Cannabis has worn a thousand masks — medicine, menace, miracle, meme — depending on the era, the culture, and who was holding the power. In High Society, JJ delivers a sharp, surprising, and deeply human history of the plant that refuses to stay in one box. From ancient rituals in India and burial rites in Scythian tombs to jazz clubs, sweat lodges, courtrooms, and dispensary chains, this book follows weed's journey through the world's empires, religions, revolutions, and contradictions.

Before we knew anything else, we had to decide what mattered. This is the story of that decision. History 101 is a time-bending, mind-bending deep dive into the very idea of history itself — how it started, who told it, what got erased, and why it still shapes everything we believe about ourselves. From firelight myths to Mesopotamian propaganda, medieval scribes to Enlightenment idealists, textbook wars to TikTok historians, this book tracks the strange evolution of how humans record the past — and how those records reflect the present more than we like to admit.

What does it really feel like to live in the world’s most powerful police state? Not from the outside. Not from the headlines. From the inside. This book isn’t a political exposé. It doesn’t rant. It doesn’t accuse. Instead, it walks — through the apartments, schools, subways, offices, phones, and daily routines of modern China. Life Inside China is calm, neutral, and observational — but quietly devastating. It shows, without saying, how surveillance becomes normal… How silence becomes safety… And how freedom fades not with violence, but with optimization.